Motivational Quotes

Music

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

- Carlyle, Thomas

Best Quotes about Music

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

10.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

11.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

12.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

13.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

14.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

15.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

16.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

17.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

18.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

20.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

21.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

22.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

23.

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

24.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

Sir Thomas Beecham

25.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

26.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

27.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

28.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

29.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

30.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

31.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

32.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

33.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

34.

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

35.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

36.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

37.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

39.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

40.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

41.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

42.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

43.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

44.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare

45.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

46.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

47.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

48.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

49.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

50.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James